The Family Fang and Lucky Us

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

I recently finished a couple of books about dysfunctional families.  In both, the parents manipulate the children, the children yearn for affection (sometimes meekly and sometimes with outrageous acts of defiance) and other family members are lascivious drunkards who are not, unsurprisingly, untrustworthy shills.  And yet, in both novels, the families survive and function, somehow, on some level.  

I love books about dysfunction for the same reason everyone else does:  They are inspiring!  Books like this show us how much the human spirit can overcome, how strong people are despite the challenges offered to them.  They bring us hope, they make us re-think what we, as people on this imperfect planet, are capable of.  They, they ..

OK, whatever.   I love them because they give me a sense of superiority! Everyone loves the view from the moral high road, right?  What’s better than closing a book about a dysfunctional family that somehow manages to survive (and thrive!) to find your own relatively well-adjusted family smiling up at you?  

Nothing.  Nothing is better. I can tsk, tsk at that poor family in the book, knowing I would help them if I could -- that’s the kind of guy I am, maybe mentor them or put them in touch with some appropriate resources if, you know, they weren’t fictional -- and then easily dismiss the imperfections of my own brood.  My son was caught cheating on a test?  My daughter is becoming a hypochondriac?  No worries, because at least they didn’t FRAME A FRIEND FOR WAR CRIMES! Raising a daughter who frames someone for war crimes??  THAT is poor parenting.  THAT is a weird family!  

Two related thoughts:

1. I hope this impulse of mine is just human nature and not a sign of some serious mental failing on my part.  I do try and fight this impulse and, for what it’s worth, sometimes I succeed.

2.  My children are not perfect, but neither have they been caught cheating on a test and / or becoming a hypochondriac. Yet. It’s still early in my parenting, though, so no judgement on my part.

Anyway, these two books, The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson, and Lucky Us by Amy Bloom, have much, much more going for them than their ability to make me feel good about my scrappy, day-to-day family life.  They are both funny and touching.  They have characters you will root for and characters who are so resilient, so inspiring, that you’ll want to be a better person yourself. Honestly. Additionally, they both cover decades, not days,  so that we can see the breadth of a family and its interactions, and that's a nice break from something focused on just a few days (like Catcher in the Rye, which I've recently been teaching).

A few words about each:The Family Fang is funny and outrageous.  The Fangs have always incorporated their children into their bizarre and sometimes dangerous performance art, and as the children, “A and B,” come of age they start to realize how much their family and its madcap and inspired set pieces have influenced them.  I didn’t love the last hundred pages as much as I did the first two hundred, but it’s still worth a read. There’s a longer review and summary here.  And, oh my, a movie with Jason Bateman coming out at sometime?

The second book, Lucky Us has two sentences in it that make it an automatic “must-read.”  And I swear to you that these words are in the book:

“My wife came from a very good family.  The Reardons of Ohio.”

HA! I kid you not.  (Reardon is my name, by the way).  The author even spelled Reardon correctly!  I hope one of my daughter’s future husbands uses that line… 

Lucky Us is a fast read, 234 pages with generously-spaced margins and (in my edition) large-enough-to-read-without-your-cheaters font.  It’s about a manufactured family and the disparate desires that force them  apart and the unspoken responsibilities that bring them together.  There’s so much more to it, and you can certainly find more thorough reviews elsewhere, but I’ve already gone on longer than I meant to.  

In sum, for whatever reason you read them, both are worth your time!

A Song of Ice and Fire

Also known as A Game of Thrones

I have never self-identified as a reader of fantasy.  It wasn’t in judgement or fear of being called a geek -- I’ve almost always been a geek -- it was just that I would have said I was more into, I don’t know, books without dragons, with humans instead of dwarves and passion in lieu of magic.  I say that, and I believe that, but when I did a little research about popular fantasy novels, I found I had read almost all of them.  What does that mean???  I’m self-delusional? People in general like fantasy even if they think they don’t? Good fantasy is just good writing and good writing is popular?

I think the answer is “All of the above.”

In any event, I spent the end of the summer reading and loving the Game of Thrones books, more correctly known, I guess, as A Song of Ice and Fire series.  They’ve become very popular due to the successful HBO adaptation, but among fantasy readers, these books have always been highly acclaimed.  And as such they have been written about, and discussed, and argued over ad nauseam.  So I won’t say much, but I will note just a few thoughts:

1.  The books are massive, with each one being at least 1,000 pages in the trade paperback versions I was reading.  A lot happens, but it’s the sheer number of people and places, the intricacies of the relationships between and among characters and locations, that makes this thick, dense series a marvel.

2.  The names!  The characters have names, of course, but they also have titles.  And nicknames, and relatives and wards and epithets that they often use to identify each other.  And their swords have names and their towns and castles and keeps.  It’s relentless.  Here’s an example from A Feast of Crows:

A crowd had gathered round to wish him well and seek his favor.  Victarion saw men from every isle:  Blacktydes, Tawneys, Orkwoods, Stonetrees, Wynches, and many more.  The Goodbrothers of Old Wyk, and the Goodbrothers of Orkmont all had come.  The Codds were there, though every decent man despised them.  Humble Shepherds, Weavers, and Netleys rubbed shoulders with men from Houses ancient and proud; even humble Humbles, the blood of thralls and salt wives.

                   And if you’re wondering if you really have to keep all of those names and places straight in your head, the answer is YES! But with some help from Mr. Martin, as I learned.

3.  Because of its length and breadth, this series constitutes some of the more challenging reading that I’ve ever done.  I finally learned, by about the 500th page of the third book, that I needed to be patient with my reading.  I would start a chapter utterly confused, with only the slightest inkling of a memory about who a character was or what the setting signified.  But as the chapter went on, the connections became clear. Martin doesn’t abandon his readers, but he challenges you to KEEP UP!

4. The last few hundred pages of ALL of these books just race by.  Or I raced through them.  In any event, the suspense is ratcheted up, the action becomes heated, and the resolution (or a resolution -- there are still at least two more books to go!) seems near.  It’s just highly recommended reading!